Mage Wars Racing!

[Sailor Vulcan]

Rather than killing the enemy mage, the object of the game is for a friendly mage to reach the finish line before any enemy mages. When a creature takes damage, their speed is decreased by the amount of damage they took. When a creature heals or otherwise has damage removed from it, their speed is increased by the amount of damage removed. Mages cannot die, but non-mage creatures can. A mage's damage cannot be greater than their life, and no creature's speed can be less than 0.

A creature's speed is the max number of zones they can move during their action phase. Being restrained reduces a creature's speed by 3 rather than trapping them. Effects that give a creature fast or slow instead give a speed multiplier of 2 or one half respectively. Hindering and lumbering both reduce speed by one.

The number of lanes depends on the number of participating mages. With two mages there should be four lanes. (this gives room for non mage creatures too.)


What do you think?

[Sailor Vulcan]

Also, I'm probably going to need some way to create multiple copies of a card at once in order to setup a game in this format reasonably quickly so I can test it. Otherwise I'm not sure anyone's going to want to play.

[lettucemode]

Instead of lanes, how about laps around the board? Normal rules, but each mage must complete 3 complete laps around the board to win. A mage completes a lap when they leave their starting square, enter and leave every other non-center square on the board in circular order, and return to their starting square.

You'd probably need to restrict or ban certain cards with either ruleset though.

[Sailor Vulcan]

It's for balancing purposes. If a regular board was used then mages would be moving in single file around the board. Hindering itself would be OP, not to mention that aggressive mages would have a huge unfair advantage over control.

An aggro mage is going to want to do a ton of damage quickly so they can get a good enough lead early on to reach the finish line first.

A control mage is going to want to focus on defending themselves from attacks and/or removing damage while building up for a powerful assault against the enemy when they're a couple laps ahead, so that the control mage can jog straight past them to the goal while their enemy is taking too much damage to move much. This won't work without lanes.

[Sailor Vulcan]

I'm also thinking it might be a good idea for all creatures' speeds to increase by 1 each reset phase. That way healing isn't the only way to speed up. Increasing a creature's life value would increase its max speed.

The starting life values of all mages should probably be reduced. I'm thinking maybe life should be reduced by ten for all mages?